The Museum of Modern Art, which has defined Modernism more powerfully than perhaps any other institution, can often seem monolithic in the mind’s eye, essentially unchanged since its doors opened in 1929: a procession of solemn white-box galleries, an ice palace of formalism, the Kremlin (as the artist Martha Rosler once called it) of 20th-century art.

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Audrey Hepburn and Alfred H. Barr Jr. with a Picasso in 1957.CreditPhotography by Barry Kramer/The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

But a more complicated story has always been told by the hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the museum’s archives, a vast accumulation of historical detail that has been accessible mainly to scholars. Beginning Thursday, after years of planning and digitizing, much of that archive will now be available on the museum’s website, moma.org, searchable so that visitors can time-travel to see what the museum looked like during its first big show (“Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” in the fall of 1929); during seminal exhibitions (Kynaston McShine’s “Information” show in 1970, one of the earliest surveys of Conceptual art); and during its moments of high-minded glamour (Audrey Hepburn, in 1957, admiring a Picasso with Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s domineering first director).

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An installation view of “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” at MoMA in the fall of 1929.CreditPeter Juley, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Michelle Elligott, chief of the museum’s archives, who undertook the project with Fiona Romeo, the director of digital content and strategy, said that translating documents from the physical to the virtual yielded some real-world historical discoveries. Yes, as the museum has long suspected but could never quite say definitively, Picasso is the artist who has been included in the most exhibitions (more than 320).

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The 1939 exhibition “Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity,” the museum’s first solo show devoted to a female artist, Dahlov Zorach Ipcar.CreditThe Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Archivists also found the first solo show devoted to a female artist, earlier than previously believed, but not exactly momentous. Opened in 1939 in a gallery focused on education, it was called “Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity” and featured work made from the age of 3 to the age of 22 by Dahlov Zorach Ipcar, a budding artist who was chosen, as a news release stated, because she was “neither a genius nor a prodigy” but a “normal healthy child” whose art facility might demonstrate that anyone could become creative “with proper stimulation and encouragement.” (Ms. Ipcar, now 98, went on to have a modest but active career.)

The digital archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, most never previously available online, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (The project, supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, will continue to add documents from more recent years and also plans to add archives from the museum’s film and performance departments.)

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The “Information” exhibit in 1970.CreditThe Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

“This is like a dream come true for me,” said Ms. Elligott, “because I’ve been playing around with this material for 20 years and I know the depth of what’s here.”

One of the surprises for regular museum visitors will undoubtedly be the highly varied forms the galleries and exhibition programs have taken since the museum first opened in rented offices on Fifth Avenue and then grew, on 53rd Street, into the shiny, streamlined version that the architects Edward Durell Stone and Philip Johnson helped create.

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“Machine Art,” an exhibition from 1934.CreditThe Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

For the show “Machine Art” in 1934, a pioneering exhibition of sleek industrial design and consumer goods, the museum looked like a set for a Modern-art museum straight out of a Fritz Lang movie. But in 1945, for example, the permanent collection began with traditional-looking galleries titled “Art of the Common Man” — on one side, funky American folk works, some by anonymous artists, and on the other side what was called “Modern Primitive,” with paintings like a circus scene by Camille Bombois, a self-taught artist and onetime circus strongman whose work is now starting to get hot, almost half a century after his death.

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The Museum Collection of Painting and Sculpture exhibit (1945-46).CreditThe Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

“The entire website is conceived of by the museum now as a living archive,” Ms. Elligott said, “and this is really just the beginning, the first phase of bringing its history out in all its detail.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: MoMA’s Digitized Archives Offer a Journey Through Time. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe